Friday, February 16, 2018

"Dunkirk": Britain’s Band of Brothers

“Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!” That’s
the beginning of a famous speech in which Shakespeare’s Henry V urges his
troops forward. It’s 1415, and the British are invading France, in a series of
battles that are part of the Hundred Years’ War. Somewhat later in
Shakespeare’s Henry V, the young king
– who in the spirit of the times personally leads his men into battle –
addresses them, manfully insisting that the odds stacked against them will only
make their success more glorious. In what is always called the St. Crispin’s
Day speech, Henry waxes philosophical about the long-term fame that awaits his
soldiers, then rises to a glorious climax:

And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go
by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be rememberèd—
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers . . .

The valor of
English soldiers and their leaders, as displayed in Henry V, has of course always had high appeal for English
audiences. That’s why Winston Churchill, in the dark days of World War II,
turned to actor/director Laurence Olivier for a film version of the play, with
which to boost the morale of the English citizenry. It appeared in 1944,
dedicated to “the Commandos and Airborne Troops of Great Britain, the spirit of
whose ancestors it has humbly attempted to recapture.” The movie was a
commercial and artistic success, winning Olivier an honorary Academy Award “for
his outstanding achievement as actor, producer and director in bringing Henry V to the screen.”

Given the
tensions of those times, it’s no surprise that the war as depicted in Olivier’s
Henry V is picturesque and fairly
bloodless. Almost 50 years later, in 1989, Kenneth Branagh was gutsy enough to
film the play once again. His version (which like Olivier’s features the cream
of the British acting community) is powerful and realistic, containing battlefield
scenes that strongly convey the horrors of war.

I bring all
this up because two films that take us back more than 75 years to another
English war are in the running for the 2018 Best Picture Oscar. I confess I
haven’t seen Darkest Hour, which I understand
is best served by Gary Oldman’s stirring portrayal of Winston Churchill, captured
at a moment when he and his strong anti-Nazi views are finally coming to be
adopted by Britain’s royals and its citizenry. I did, however, see Dunkirk, which has been called an
impressionistic account of the massive British evacuation of a French beach in
one of World War II’s most pivotal moments. Dunkirk
is a labor of love for British director Christopher Nolan, who’s best known for
such science fiction and fantasy fare as The
Dark Knight and Interstellar. It’s
clear he feels deeply about this moment in history, when thousands of small
English seafaring vessels sailed across the English Channel to rescue English
soldiers. The film cuts between a pilot in the sky, the crew of a fishing boat
on the water, and a representative British “Tommy” trying to leave that
corpse-strewn French beach. My problem: I could never figure out quite where I
was and who was at the center of the action at any given moment. (At least in
my American eyes, young English actors all seem to look pretty much the same.)

Nolan has
been praised for making a strikingly different sort of war film. I certainly
got a sense of the enormity of the whole undertaking. But having to
continuously ask “Wait, what’s going on?” is not a helpful sort of history
lesson.

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As someone who has always been passionate about language, I prefer good conversation to, well, just about anything. And for me chatting about movies is a special treat. I’m convinced that movies can shape lives. On this topic I’ve got some great stories to tell, and I invite YOU to share your own. But because I’m a show biz survivor, I will also sometimes pull back the curtain to show you the inner workings of the film industry. Read, and enjoy!